Possibly the biggest third party release this holiday season, Assassin’s Creed II has been delayed on the PC side of things to 2010. It is awfully odd all these PC delays on games and this is a rather lengthy one for a game releasing on 360 and PS3 on November 17 this year. Wonder what the delay is for.

As I talked about last week, the facts were building that the Wii would get a drop to $199 on September 27. Nintendo confirmed that announcing the new price on Thursday, but delaying the actual drop until September 27. In my opinion console makers need to think of a different way to advertise this via the retailers. The internet knows week ahead of time because of the Sunday ad leadtime companies have to have. We knew about this weeks ago, but Nintendo couldn’t make an announcement until close to the release of the September 27 retail ads in Sunday papers.

Along with this announcement, Nintendo also announced that the multiplayer New Super Mario Bros. game will be released on November 15. This game is notable for the co-op stuff, but it is also notable because it is the first game to include the ability to leave the game and let it play the game for you. It will be interesting to see if this catches on, but can you imagine the future where you hit a hard spot in a game and just decide to let the system get through that section for you? Wow, that’s crazy!

Two more dates were given this week. The first was that Ubisoft gave Splinter Cell Conviction a February 23, 2010 date for release. It’s sad this game got moved to 2010 and it is now in a heavy release time, but hopefully it can stand out. In sad news since many were thinking this would be released later this year is that Sony has given Gran Turismo 5 a March 2010 release window in Japan. Now, it isn’t unheard of for a game to come out in the US and Europe before Japan and we’re all waiting for some sign from Sony on a date, but none as of yet.

Source: me

Rumors of Microsoft Acquiring EA Increases EA Stock Price

Possibly the biggest rumor this week was the one floated on Wednesday where Microsoft was thinking about acquiring Electronic Arts. The rumors helped EA’s stock go up by quite a bit and Microsoft denied wanting to acquire them, but looking beyond that this would be very interesting if it happened. EA is the second largest third party company next to Activision now and it would be interesting to see if Microsoft would make their games exclusive after this wave of games or if they would allow them to still sell their games multiplatform. There have been rumors of Disney wanting to buy EA for over a year as well. I would not be surprised if EA gets acquired by someone, but who knows.

An interesting mix of games this week with the rails shooter Dead Space: Extraction, the new DS-based Kingdom Hearts game, the overpriced PSP Go system and Gran Turismo finally making its PSP debut with the release of the Go. Who here thought we would ever see that game? Not me.